Views of the French and Italian countryside dominate Adolphe Appian’s oeuvre. He preferred charcoal — an important independent medium by mid-19th century— for its broad tonal ranges in his plein-air studies of nature. Like many of his compositions, Italianate Landscape with a River is dotted with little figures, in the later style of his friend Camille Corot, who never wished “to cut the umbilical cord linking nature and man.”